By admin 
With reviewing hardware for more than 22 years, when it comes to cooling products there are few brands that can still get me intrigued like Noctua. With their recent launch of the NL-LC1 all-in-one liquid coolers, I decided to try out the Noctua NL-LC1-36 360mm AIO cooler that is working out well for cooling high-end desktop CPUs like the recently launched Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.
Noctua recently launched their first all-in-one liquid cooling products as a collaboration with Asetek. As such it’s not an entirely in-house product but built upon the Astetek Emma V2 platform while integrating a pump noise absorber and employing Noctua’s legenday cooling fans on the radiator. The Noctua NL-LC1 series is currently made up of 240mm, 360mm, and 420mm product versions with the NC-LC1-36 being the one I have been testing the past few weeks with the 360mm radiator and using three Noctua NF-A14x25 G2 fans.
The Noctua NL-LC1 uses a custom-engineered pump noise absorber developed by Noctua and indeed this is among the quietest all-in-one liquid cooling loops I have used.
This Astetek-based liquid cooling platform makes use of Noctua’s SecuFirm2+ multi-socket mounting system for working with AMD AM4 / AM5 and Intel LGA-1700 and LGA-1851 processors. Noctua SecuFirm2+ is easy to work with and I had no issues dealing with it in my testing with AMD AM5 Ryzen 7000/9000 series processors.
Unlike the clear majority of other Asetek-based all-in-one liquid cooling systems out there for desktop PCs, the Noctua NL-LC1 products feature no RGB lighting. Just the black pump and radiator and the classic Noctua brown-and-beidge fan colors. So for those not into RGB lighting, the Noctua NL-LC1 is classic. For its pump and fan control it relies just on standard PWM modulation. In turn the lack of RGB lighting and no proprietary USB-based vendor protocols means nothing to worry about for the Linux support. Unlike other RGB-heavy AIO coolers seeing the open-source community coming up with solutions for controlling lighting and pump/fan controls.
On the downside, the Noctua NL-LC1 coolers are on the more expensive end compared to other vendors. As of writing the Nl-LC1-36 model is retailing for $249 USD from the likes of Amazon (affiliate link).